


A Temporary Arrangement

by bec



Category: Ellen Kushner - Swordspoint series
Genre: M/M, Yuletide, challenge:Yuletide 2007
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 15:45:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1095762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bec/pseuds/bec
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He dreams of losing a challenge to youth and innovation and raw talent, and of giving over his own legend into the forging of another's, but he could be killed tomorrow in a way that does no honor to either blade."</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Temporary Arrangement

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Alice Montrose](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Alice+Montrose).



> Originally written for Yuletide 2007. Thanks to deliberatehips for the beta and the encouragement.

* * *

_'Tis the times' plague, when madmen lead the blind._  
\--Gloucester, _King Lear_ IV.i  
 

The fight comes as a surprise that night. No one has jostled Alec in a tavern since Richard made sure every pickpocket, fence, and beggar knew the full title of the skinny student who gambled badly and drank well. No one has spit full in Alec's face, either, and Alec's eyes glitter with pure delight even as he wipes the spittle off his cheek. The man--broad, with pox-pitted skin and incongruously lovely amber eyes--must be new to the city, a village bravo with a mind to becoming a noble's retainer.

Richard's sword is drawn and his blood rushing and tingling with excitement in his belly and lips before the bravo's woman can draw him behind a table. She looks pale, even in the firelight, and he sees the worried glance she throws Ginnie. Everyone else in the room cooperates, dragging their chairs and stools out of the way, and then they are dancing. His opponent has a surprising style--clever sidesteps and a trick of pulling back long after Richard would have thought he'd lose his balance--but he's panting soon enough. He hasn't killed anyone for Alec since Lord Horn, and he wants to do so quickly and neatly and then hurry them back to their rooms, to their bed.

Then there's sweat in his eyes, except his forehead is dry and he feels no sting, but there's nothing but a blur before him, with details to either side: Alec's mouth dropping open and half-drunk tankards lining the bar. Richard hears the crowd roar and gabble, senses them press forward, before he feels the pain slicing shallow across his collarbone.

"First blood!" some fool calls, as though this were a formal challenge at a garden party. Richard hears Alec making a peculiar keening sound, but then he shakes his head, hard, and the scene comes back into focus, though everything has gone slow and quiet. "Don't--don't kill him"--that must be the pretty pale woman. Richard lunges forward and his point slides into the man's right eye, the amber iris clouding with red. He crumples to the ground and Richard's sword wrenches free, trailing a viscous string of red and silver-grey behind it.

Someone is vomiting. Richard simply walks out, but not before he hears, "But he always kills with a single blow to the heart."

"Not tonight."

 

* * *

 

Alec catches up to him at the corner. Richard is slumped like an adolescent against a threshold, the heels of his palms rubbing and rubbing at his eyes. Alec grabs his wrists and pulls at them until Richard looks up. His gaze is clear and his mouth is trembling.

Alec taps his own chest, his elegant fingers drumming out a firm, uneven rhythm to the left of his breastbone. "A single blow. A single blow, Richard."

 

* * *

 

Months go by, then years, without any incident out of the ordinary, and if Richard spends more money on wax candles than usual, and if Alec never leaves loose papers strewn slippery across the floor of their rooms anymore, neither mentions it.

In due time, Alec enters his grandmother's sickroom as a Lord and leaves, with white, thin lips and a stubborn set to his chin, as a Duke. He engages a new tailor, listens to lectures on his responsibilities and quotes them back to Richard using funny voices, and occasionally sweeps into the Council to make trouble. No one bothers him in the alleys and taverns of Riverside, and Richard, who doesn't do weddings, finds himself in less need of money and in more need of work to occupy his time than ever before. Alec throws himself into interior decoration and other hobbies.

There is, for instance, the month Alec takes up juggling. A troupe of tumblers has become fashionable up on the Hill, and Alec begins to show up at parties. His presence is greatly remarked upon at first, for though Lord David Campion had received a flood of invitations directly after the scandal at the Council of Lords, and then again when he became the Duke Tremontaine, his appearances have so far been few and not nearly as outrageous as had been hoped.

The flood had abated to a steady stream, for form's sake, and the young lord's sudden interest in the dances thrown for the daughters of countrified nobles and their mothers' evenings of cards and music naturally occasions comment. He is coming up on thirty, after all. No matter how oddly he still behaves (with his patronage of orphans and radical scholars and those properties he kept buying up and renovating into a rabbit warren in Riverside, and with his penchant for indirect murder), conventional wisdom held that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife. The very notion is enough to send conventional matrons quite into hysterics, but others, keener and more forward-looking, encourage their girls to showcase their interest in poetry and the welfare of the poor.

The titillating rumor that Duke Tremontaine is seeking a bride fades as soon as society realizes that he attends these entertainments for the entertainment itself: Alec has taken a fancy to Camilla, the nimble thirteen-year-old juggler of the troupe, and routinely closets himself with her in piano rooms and conservatories, tossing balls of primary colors back and forth.

He practices in Richard's rooms as well. It's a novelty; Richard has never seen Alec practice at anything whatsoever, and it's amusing, at first, when he's hopeless at it and the balls go every which way and Alec squeaks and shies away when they come too close to his face. He likes being the one to distract, for a change, slipping up behind Alec, breathing warmly on the back of his neck, feeling the tempo in his shoulders falter until he hears the familiar thud of beanbags hitting the floor and Alec turns, angry and eager, into his embrace.

Once Alec can keep five balls aloft for five minutes at a time, however, it's a different proposition. The faint rhythm of throws and catches and the murmuring of numbers as Alec tries for a new record bring Richard quite in sympathy with their long-departed neighbors, who had shouted their protests as he attacked their shared wall with his blade.

"Please, Alec. Are you planning on running off and joining a troupe of traveling players? Who will monitor the tax code if you do?"

"It amuses me. And you can't do it."

Richard doubts that.

"I could do it with my eyes shut," Alec crows, and does so. He doesn't notice Richard stiffen. When he's opened his eyes again, Richard is standing before him, sword drawn, eyes fixed on the rising and falling of yellow, red, blue, green, purple, yellow, red, blue. Richard closes his eyes deliberately and twists the sword between them and up. He breathes in, looks. The balls are pierced in a line down the length of the blade, like bits of lamb on a skewer: yellow. red. blue. green. purple.

 

* * *

 

It is because he can do such things that Richard is able to convince himself for years that a certain lack of clarity in the outlines of objects could be the result of sleepless nights; that the pounding headaches, blurring color and shape, could be the result of the pungent smoke that sends Alec into mad rants about metaphor and the movement of light; that his inability to focus on Alec's long nose and pleading mouth could be the result of passion.

Pretense dies abruptly one morning when he wakes up and tries to open his eyes, only to find that they are already open.

 

* * *

 

The roofs of Riverside are a topsy-turvy affair, cobbled together like there had long ago been a prize in the clouds and, though each architect would be damned if he didn't get there first, it had been snatched away maliciously, leaving the eaves and gables and chimneys to slump together in disappointment.

Alec returns from a particularly trying day of polite conversation and thoroughly impolite politics to find the cook in the courtyard wringing her apron in her hands and screeching that Richard is on the roof and will not come down. It's true; Alec can see him pacing across a ledge, head lifted to the sky, silhouetted like a tightrope walker. Alec feels ill; he rushes inside and up the stairs and out the small library window, which is almost grown over with ivy. The gargoyles make good handholds, but the roof tiles are slick with spring rain.  
He realizes he's talking as he clambers up after Richard. "You mustn't. I won't let you. Where would that leave me?"

Richard pivots with a speed that leaves Alec breathless. He looks puzzled, and backs away when Alec reaches out for him. They scuffle with each other, Alec shouting that Richard may as well take him down, too, if he insists on giving up this way. Alec's foot strikes a loose shingle, and he slips, and shrieks.

Richard's face loses its mild detachment. He pulls Alec towards him firmly by the waist, and they both tip over, but away from the gutter and the long drop, and sit down quite hard three feet down on a gentle slope leading to a chimney.

They lie back against the warm tiles, breath heaving. The sun seems hotter up here, and heavier, like a weight pressing down on their bodies, keeping them from flying off into the heavens.

"I knew you wouldn't, not with me along," Alec says. "Just for spite."

Richard's eyes flick sideways, but the movement halts before it quite reaches the plane of Alec's face, as though his gaze were a sword and he were demonstrating an attack to unarmed opponent. "Let's get you inside."

 

* * *

 

Richard hadn't been planning on falling or jumping off. He has been testing himself, much as he used to do when he was just starting out, testing his balance and reflexes and his four other senses. Alec has never seen him run full-tilt along the hand-railing of the bridge, but then, by the time he met Alec, he was long past proving himself to himself, and had nearly left proving himself to others behind as well.

Which was not to say that he doesn't value all that he'd put into those various proofs. Not to say that, even though he has lived longer than he ever expected, he was now willing to die in a way no one had ever expected: at the sword of a lesser man. He dreams of losing a challenge to youth and innovation and raw talent, and of giving over his own legend into the forging of another's, but he could be killed tomorrow in a way that does no honor to either blade.

Jumping from a great height is hardly the remedy, though; no matter how glorious Alec thinks suicide. 

 

* * *

 

The first time Richard says it aloud, Alec is too startled to do anything but repeat his question:

"Which do you prefer, the russet or the crimson?"

"I'm going blind," Richard says.

"...no, russet or crimson?"

"I'm going blind."

"You're blind?"

"Are you deaf?" Richard snaps.

Alec bursts out laughing; he can't help it, the laughter rips its way out of his throat in loud, ugly swells that sound like sobs.

"There's no call for that," Richard says, sounding affronted, but he smiles too, and for a moment, Alec believes that they will be all right.

 

* * *

 

Much later, Alec can't remember the last time they came together in earnest in the city. He doesn't recognize it as such as the time, and they all seem to begin the same way: he pleads for Richard not to go, he promises protection, promises everything, and Richard never responds, but simply takes him apart until he's left spent and shaking, with nothing left to offer. Was it the time in the lavender grove at Tremontaine House, when Alec pulled bunches and bunches of blooms off the bushes with nervous fingers, speaking of surgeons and court appointments and setting up a training school for young swordsmen, when Richard knocked him, deft and gentle, onto the carpet of flowers he'd created and the heady aroma rose like a blessing around their kisses? Was it right before Alec left for that dreadful party at the Perrys' and threatened to poke out his own eyes with a brandished oyster fork? Richard had groaned to feel his mouth, and had stood, watching with his eyes fixed somewhere over Alec's shoulder, as Alec still knelt and touched himself until he cried out "Touch me, touch me please your hands" and then Richard had taken up the fork, turned his back, and left Alec kneeling there in his rumpled, soiled finery. Was it--no, Alec prefers to believe the last time was in bed, their bodies painted with blue moonlight and Richard moving in him with deliberate grace. His hands sliding for purchase on the fine sheets. Richard pinning them over his head. Their mouths joining and biting and loving, messy, easy, with nothing left to prove.

"Stay. Stay with me."

"Come with me."

 

* * *

 

It will be a temporary arrangement, Alec explains. He doesn't like the associations--putting a thoroughbred out to pasture, pensioning off an old retainer, hiding the pregnant mistress in the country--but he can't avoid them. He offers Highcombe proper at first, but Richard objects. The village will talk, he says. Who is this mysterious man taking up residence in the Duke's house? Word would spread to the city, and soon the people would come out to try to look at him, some to try to kill him. Richard was from a village himself; Alec ceded the point. He would live in the cottage with the blue door and enjoy the apple orchard. He would rest up, rest his eyes, away from the stimulation and excitement of the city. In time--after the apple harvest, perhaps--he would return.

Alec spreads rumors, wild rumors that Richard is the scion of a royal family from across the seas, called back to take up the throne; or that he has run off to his first love, the sea; or that he is in a deep enchanted slumber and will come again when the land has great need of him.

It will be a temporary arrangement.

 


End file.
